This past Saturday night, while eating brownies and drinking wine at my sister’s place in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I was also swimming with whales in Hawaii.

The underwater trip (simply taken in my imagination) was made possible by The Whalesong Project, a grassroots organization “dedicated to inspiring stewardship of the oceans and the environment, and to helping ‘give a microphone’ to important voices that may not be heard above the noise of the modern world.” To accomplish this mission, they are capturing the sounds of humpback whales and broadcasting them to the world--connecting people to nature at a time when nature often seems far removed and whales are threatened.

To bring these voices to primetime, the volunteers have sunk a hydrophone (a microphone for underwater) in the Pacific, near Maui, Hawaii, where humpbacks routinely gather. The microphone is connected to a floating buoy, which relays the whalesong, via radio signal, to the Maui shore, where it is then broadcast to anyone who wants to listen--including my sister and I, miles away in Ohio.

Let me be clear: these whale sounds are not digitally enhanced, nor are they being overlaid on to an orchestral score (such as this recording of nature meets the Nutcracker ballet). The whales on the Whalesong Project are L-I-V-E, and can be listened to any time of day, as long as the whales are around. For me, it was captivating to think that the slow, full, often tragic sounds projected from my computer on Saturday night were really, actually happening out there somewhere, in an ocean hundreds upon hundreds of miles away.

To listen: The group web site offers a variety of suggestions, but the one that worked best for me was pasting the following URL into the audio stream box on iTunes: http://www.live365.com/play/whalesongmaui. Keep this web address handy, for prime listening season is just around the corner: Maui is a hotspot for whales from November to June.  

[Photo: A humpback whale breaches off of Polo Beach, in Maui, Hawaii. Credit: gumption, flickr.com]